(Uli Edel, Germany, 1981, 131 minutes)
"I felt so much, that I started to feel nothing."--Christiane F.
"This is one of the most horrifying films I have ever seen."--Roger Ebert
Though German filmmaker Uli Edel's directorial debut, Christiane F., an adaptation of We Children from Bahnhof Zoo, a 1978 memoir ghostwritten by journalists Kai Hermann and Horst Rieck, takes place in pre-unification Berlin, it opens much like Martin Scorsese's New York-set Taxi Driver.
Instead of "garbage," "trash," "scum," and worse, 13-year-old Christiane (fully committed newcomer Natja Brunckhorst, who wasn't much older) rails, in voiceover, against the "piss and shit everywhere."
Understandably, Christiane would prefer to be anywhere else, and she doesn't see school as a viable alternative. Her sister shares the sentiment to the extent that she goes to live with their father shortly after the film begins, leaving Christiane all alone, since their mom (East German actress Christiane Lechle) spends most of her time at work or with her new boyfriend, Klaus (Uwe Diderich). Though Edel never blames the mother for Christiane's downward spiral, the virtual absence of any parental figures--her biological father never makes a single appearance--doesn't help.
Christiane looks to Sound, a discotheque catering to teenagers, as the solution to her problem. Once she's out of her mother's sight, she applies sky blue eyeshadow and blood red lipstick and exchanges her sneakers for high heels. She doesn't look 18, but she does look older than 13, and the doorman appears to be pretty lax. From Zoo Station–the same station U2 references on 1991's Achtung Baby–she's ready to roll into the club with her more mature friend Kessi (Daniela Jaeger), not so much to dance, though she's a big Bowie fan, but to hang out and meet other young people.
After rejecting an offer to get high, she and Kessi settle into a screening room to watch Night of the Living Dead as a particularly persistent young man tries to feel Christiane up. While she fends him off and Kessi makes out with another guy, a pale, zombified Karen Cooper (nine-year-old Kyra Schon), in George Romero's film, terrorizes--and devours--her parents.
Detlef (Thomas Haustein), a handsome young man who had been observing her, along with his friend Bernd (Jan Georg Effler), tells Christiane, "You shouldn’t have taken that pill." His tone isn't judgmental, so much as matter of fact.
That night, they go their separate ways, but a connection has been made.
Christiane starts telling her mom she's hanging out with Kessi whenever she goes to Sound, though it's mostly to see Detlef. Klaus, meanwhile, tries to win her favor by giving her a copy of Changes One Bowie. To her credit, she doesn't admit she already has it, and simply thanks him. It's one of the first Bowie appearances, though there will be many more, like the evening in which Christiane, Kessi, and their extended friend group go running, jumping, and tumbling past shuttered shops at night as Bowie's soaring "Heroes" scores their youthful hijinx. Though Bowie had originally given the production two songs for free, that number would grow to nine, leading to a soundtrack album featuring material from his four most recent records.
Unlike the girls, though, Detlef and Bernd don't live at home, but in a flat so trashed it's probably a squat, and the boys will do anything to get by. Edel eschews any backstory, but their home lives presumably became untenable.
When Detlef bashes a shop window to scoop money out of the register, Christiane is alarmed, but undeterred, even when cops give chase, leading to one of the film's lovelier moments as the kids end up hiding out in the neon blue glow of a Mercedes Benz sign atop a multi-story building (another lovely moment involves a comforting cuddle with a purring cat). If it wasn't already apparent, it will become soon: these are kids who will never own a luxury car. If anything, they'll be lucky to make it out of their teens alive.
Every time Christiane enters the station, which overtakes Sound as her hangout of choice, she clocks the junkies (a coalition of first-time actors and actual addicts who wandered into shots). They look terrible, and Edel does nothing to glamorize the scene, and yet anti-glamor exerts a seduction of its own, and when Christiane finds out that Detlef and Bernd shoot up, she wants in on that action.
Once again, Detlef warns her away. "Don't take that shit," he cautions, adding that he won't want to see her again if she does, though it's not like she's scared of needles. When she notices the tiny blue snake on his hand, she gives herself one, too, and since Edel was all about verisimilitude, Assistant Director Babette Kirchhoff served as the hand model and got the tattoo for real (the shooting up, on the other hand, was faked).
When Christiane finds out about an upcoming Bowie concert, she asks her mom for tickets for her birthday, and she comes through. She gets a nice cake, too. So far, Edel has given little indication that poor parenting is pushing her toward the streets, though the real-life Christiane came from an abusive home. Nonetheless, the more time Christiane spends with Detlef, the less she spends at home to the extent that her mom will eventually disappear from the film. Though it serves the narrative, there was a more practical reason for her departure: Edel didn't seek permission to film inside the station, whose interior was under communist control, so when word got out, Christiane Lechle was no longer allowed to work on the film. Kessi also disappears when her mom decides Christiane is a "bad influence."
While hanging around the station, Christiane befriends other girls, like the bubbly Babette, aka Babsi (Christiane Reichelt), who stays at her flat when her mom isn't around. Babsi is otherwise homeless, and Christiane gets another rude awakening when she finds out how all these boys and girls make money: sex work, though Detlef insists that "I only jerk them off."
Though Bowie was keen to participate in the film, he had relocated to the States to star in The Elephant Man on Broadway, so he couldn't film a concert in Germany. Instead, Edel arranged to film in New York, which he did, but it almost didn't happen after Bowie's friend and "Fame" duet partner John Lennon was shot and killed on December 8, 1980. Bowie managed to collect himself in time to perform "Station to Station" with a band featuring guitarists Carlos Alomar and G.E. Smith as Christiane gazes up at him with stars in her eyes. Edel filmed everything else in West Berlin, including a sequence featuring greasy bikers. If they seem out of place at a Bowie show, that's because Edel spliced in footage from an AC/DC concert.
She isn’t wrong, though, in thinking it will bring them closer together. Before, Detlef was playing the field, but after the trip, they become inseparable in the worst of ways. Even so, he never pressures her to try heroin in any form, and nor does he pressure her for sex. She instigates all of these things. As dark as Christiane F. gets, it could have been worse.
For the purposes of this piece, I revisited Edel's 1989 adaptation of Hubert Selby Jr's Last Exit to Brooklyn, which he also filmed on location--Brooklyn rather than Berlin--and the fate of Jennifer Jason Leigh's Tralala is just as harrowing as I remember. Like Christiane, she's still alive at the end of the picture, but it's hard to imagine she has much of a future ahead of her.
Christiane, meanwhile, does what she can to forestall hers. When Detlef dissuades her, yet again, from shooting up, she borrows another junkie's kit and does the damn thing. Sharing a dirty needle is a fantastic way to meet the Reaper, but instead, she just nods off in a disgusting toilet stall. "This is fucked up, what you're doing," Detlef scolds, while doing the same thing.
As Christiane sinks deeper into addiction, she dyes her hair red and ditches the makeup, but they're minor details compared to the pallor that takes over her face and the shadows that materialize under her eyes. She also appears to grow thinner, though Edel explains, in the 2026 interview included with the new Criterion Collection edition, that that was due to sleight of hand, i.e. the removal of a padded bra, since Brunckhorst was already quite thin. Christiane's final form: a walking dead girl, just as Detlef had predicted.
The degradation continues as Christiane turns to sex work and their friends start to die. She and Detlef make noises about quitting. "Someday we'll find a way to stop," she muses before shooting up at home and temporarily losing the ability to walk or talk, at which point her mom reappears, but instead of getting her professional help, she and Klaus locate Detlef, so the two kids can kick together, which they do after hours and hours of sweating, shivering, and puking before relapsing almost immediately afterward.
Unlike Beatrice Sparks' 1971 bestseller Go Ask Alice, the purported memoir of a teenage addict and the resulting ABC Movie of the Week, in which the protagonist succumbs to an overdose, Christiane eventually gets clean, though Edel leaves that part off the screen. The real-life Christiane Felscherinow, however, did not. Possibly due to the age difference, Edel actually invited her, rather than Brunckhorst, to join him for the film's US promotional tour, but she had to leave the country after a heroine bust.
Now 64, Felscherinow was 17 when Hermann and Rieck published their book, compiled from two years of recorded conversations for a series of articles in German newsweekly Stern. It became a sensation, and the film seemed set to follow suit, but critics didn't embrace it as enthusiastically, not even with the involvement of honorary Berliner Bowie, who had so admired the book. In his Criterion interview, Edel claims that the "reviews were devastating." What he doesn't mention is that it made a lot of money.
In America, though, the film met with a somewhat warmer reception, even in a poorly-dubbed version, to the extent that it’s now been restored, re-released, and given the deluxe home video treatment. It's even inspired superfans, like Anora director Sean Baker, who have made collecting Christiane F. promo material a lifelong pursuit. Baker appears in a new Criterion appreciation to wax poetic about the film and his 3,000 posters.
In a special feature from 2022, Brunckhorst recalls her life during and after the production. Though her character goes through hell and back, she insists she had a great time making the film, not least because she was surrounded by an attentive crew and other young people who had never acted before, all of whom acquit themselves nicely. It was such a positive experience that she would pursue a movie career, and she made her next appearance, the following year, in Rainer Werner Fassbinder's final feature, Querelle.
In the 1990s, Brunckhorst would segue from acting to writing and in the 2000s, directing. Her latest feature, Two to One starring Sandra Hüller, was a hit in Germany. Her Christiane F. co-star, Thomas Haustein, however, was so affected by the film's subject matter that he became a drug counselor, though his Instagram suggests he also holds fond memories of the film.
As for Felscherinow, she became an actress, musician, mother, Einstürzende Neubauten associate, and in 2013, she even released a memoir cowritten with Sonja Vuković, Mein Zweites Leben, aka My Second Life, but she has continued to struggle with addiction and the physical effects of long-term substance use. Though she predicted, in her book, that she wouldn't live much longer, she beat the odds, but has since retreated from public life.
In his adaptation of the original book, Uli Edel splits the difference between cinéma vérité and horror. In drawing from a work of reportage that became a cause célèbre, he was simultaneously calling attention to a phenomenon with implications beyond the borders of Berlin, while also capitalizing on it.
Whether or not Christiane F. works as a cautionary tale is another story, but that doesn't seem to have been his primary objective, not least since there will always be young people who will watch a film like this and see it more as a challenge or even a dare. Just like Christiane F., they'll convince themselves, "I can't get hooked if I just use a little...only once in a while."
Christiane F. is out now on the Criterion Collection in a new 4K digital restoration on Blu-ray and 4K+Blu-ray two-disc set with all the extras mentioned above plus two screen tests and a richly-contextual essay from Hester Baer. Images from the IMDb (Natja Brunckhorst and Daniela Jaeger, kids bathed in blue, and Jennifer Jason Leigh in Last Exit to Brooklyn), Goodreads (Christiane F. book cover), Morgue Movie Wiki (Kyra Schon in Night of the Living Dead), and filmfriend (Christiane Felscherinow).
